retrofocus wrote:
I will be honest - I will most likely wait to stream this movie on my standard 65" flatscreen TV at home. I haven't been to a movie theater for many years now. I liked the Oppenheimer movie but also streamed it years after it first came out in the theaters. I haven't touched a DVD for many years either.
I can say the same, except I recently revived my 4K BluRay player and uploaded most of my BluRays to my NAS. Many, perhaps most movies were never shot, nor preserved in a way to reflect anything but budget constraints, but the ones that were cared for from production to final Bluray can really be spectacular. This includes many Criterion Edition movies that have painstakingly been recovered. Most streaming services, such as Netflix and prime transmit with data rates are around 15-20mbps, whereas the best, like Apple can be 25-30mbps. The best BluRay 4K HDR push 100mbps and what you see is far fewer artifacts and much better shadow tones. Again, only the better transfers are really worth the effort and cost of going the BluRay route vs streaming. Most of the 4K movies use an upscaled 2K intermediary, but some use direct to 4K and especially the 65-70mm film transfers can be stunning.
I think this is much like our reliance upon online posting and viewing on our devices. Many of us have forgotten what a fine print looks like and our new measure of excellence is based upon viewing images on monitors, sometime as small as our smartphones. With little demand for top quality video/film productions, I wonder if a decade from now there will be any demand/budget for future Oppenheimer/Odyssey/2001 Space Odyssey/Ben Hur/Spartacus/Casablanca/Citizen Kane…etc.
Jul 30, 2026 at 08:34 AM
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